The Elements of Style

In a front page piece on the increasing prolixity and ambiguousness of Supreme Court decisions, Times reporter Adam Liptak found that the search for unanimity—an aim that Chief Justice Roberts has prioritized—has led to directionlessness, which may account for the increasing length of decisions. “Unanimous opinions are the most complex,” Liptak writes, citing a recent study (“Justices Are Long on Words but Short on Guidance,” NYT, 11/18/10). Interestingly, shortly after the lead-in, Liptak points to the fact that Brown v. Board of Education, a sweeping decision in the history of jurisprudence, took 4,700 words, while the recent Parents Involved v. Seattle, which only dealt with a part of the Brown case, racked up ten times the verbiage, “enough to rival a short novel.” (The same is true of “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, coming in at a cool 48,000 words, “or about the length of The Great Gatsby.”) Brown, for all its brevity, improved human life. Liptak’s piece, however, also illustrates that consensus is not the only cause of opaqueness. “A decision in May,” writes Liptak, “striking down life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders who did not kill anyone said only that states must provide ‘some meaningful opportunity to obtain release.’” Here, a decision that the court was divided on also seemed to be infected with an equanimity that castrated the very basis of the ruling. Of the decision’s vague phraseology, Justice Thomas wondered, according to Liptak, “what that could possibly mean.” Strunk and White’s Elements of Style is a classic whose application has enormous impact both on syntax and, ultimately, thought. It was once de rigeur in our country’s finest institutions of higher learning. Simplicity was one of the underlying principals for composing pity, grammatically tight texts. Yet, “omit needless words,” one of Strunk and White’s prescriptions for concise writing, is not something that can always be applied when it comes to writing laws that appeal to all, or strive not to offend certain constituencies. 

Comp 101

In high school composition classes, and later in freshman college English courses, students learn to write themes. This is the derivation of the word “theme-book.” The idea is to present a cohesive essay in which a lead paragraph or sentence sets out a proposition. It’s much like proving a theorem in geometry, and bears an uncanny resemblance to the notion of tautology in linguistics, where statements like “the red chair is red” are examples of a priori analytic knowledge—in lay terms, self-evident iterations that don’t advance our knowledge of reality. The idea of the freshman comp essay is a little more sophisticated. A rather obvious proposition that doesn’t need proving is made, such as “All men are dogs.” Supporting evidence is provided, such as “Jack is a man,” with a concluding paragraph, which in some distended way dramatizes that, yes, Jack is a dog who wants to fuck every Jill in sight. Students are thereby graduated with honors in impoverished ways of thinking and then go on to contaminate the discourse that occurs in the course of human life. This contamination of language and thinking is no mean feat. People who make inanely self-evident statements that they go on to embellish is the second leading cause of heart disease in the United States after trans fats. Not only does college encourage us to make nonsensical statements that demonstrate a complete absence of intuition and metaphysics (apologies are here rendered to A.J. Ayer, the famous philosopher and author of Language, Truth, and Logic, whose thinking has had such a deleterious effect on human thought), it encourages the life-defeating proposition that one idea should follow from the next. A new era of writing instruction must begin in which students are taught the value of the non sequitur, where unproven statements are enthusiastically encouraged, and where students are taught to stop embellishing a point ad nauseum (yes we got the idea, you don’t have to wrap it up with a bow!), and are instead shown the value of moving on to fresh ideas both in writing and in life.